The state has rejected thousands of vanity license plates with such themes to protect the public from offensive language. Most are too vulgar to print. Some are just silly: BIGBRA, ER0TIKA, F0XIE1.

But buried amid that list of licentiousness are religious, philosophical and political expressions the state also has deemed unsuitable to appear on motor vehicles. G0DROKS, G0DWH0, ILUVGUNS, GAYPWR and FEMM have been nixed by State Department of Revenue employees, who have wide latitude and only vague statutory guidance in deciding what speech gets squashed. Yet G0D4EVR, GUNLUV, GAYGAY and FEMFTAL got their nod.

Vicki Lambert, who’s in charge of such things, sees the problem this way:

Lambert understands Georgia residents have a right to free speech. Her job, she noted, is to balance that against not subjecting other people to a disgusting license plate while sitting in traffic on Interstate 75.

Well, there’s your problem: traffic is just sitting on I-75. Get it moving, and there will be no time to worry about other people’s bad taste in plates.

1 comment

ILUVGUNS might have been rejected — while GUNLUV was approved — because Georgia tags don’t have room (yet) for eight letters.

As for the rest, it’s almost certainly the luck of the draw. Some of those applications that were rejected might well have been approved had the stack been shuffled differently on the way to the in tray.